ICANN Soon to be ICANT? Obama Gives Away Internet Control

   

ICANN, the International Community, and Internet Governance

Because cyberspace and the Internet transcend national boundaries, and because the successful

functioning of the DNS relies on participating entities worldwide, ICANN is by definition an

international organization. Both the ICANN Board of Directors and the various constituency

groups who influence and shape ICANN policy decisions are composed of members from all over

the world. Additionally, ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC), which is

composed of government representatives of nations worldwide, provides advice to the ICANN

Board on public policy matters and issues of government concern. Although the ICANN Board is

required to consider GAC advice and recommendations, it is not obligated to follow those

recommendations.

Many in the international community, including foreign governments, have argued that it is

inappropriate for the U.S. government to maintain its legacy authority over ICANN and the DNS,

and have suggested that management of the DNS should be accountable to a higher

intergovernmental body. The United Nations, at the December 2003 World Summit on the

Information Society (WSIS), debated and agreed to study the issue of how to achieve greater

international involvement in the governance of the Internet and the domain name system in

particular. The study was conducted by the U.N.’s Working Group on Internet Governance

(WGIG). On July 14, 2005, the WGIG released its report, stating that no single government

should have a preeminent role in relation to international Internet governance. The report called

for further internationalization of Internet governance, and proposed the creation of a new global

forum for Internet stakeholders. Four possible models were put forth, including two involving the

creation of new Internet governance bodies linked to the U.N. Under three of the four models,

ICANN would either be supplanted or made accountable to a higher intergovernmental body. The

report’s conclusions were scheduled to be considered during the second phase of the WSIS held

in Tunis in November 2005. U.S. officials stated their opposition to transferring control and

administration of the domain name system from ICANN to any international body. Similarly, the

109th Congress expressed its support for maintaining U.S. control over ICANN (H.Con.Res. 268

and S.Res. 323).39

The European Union (EU) initially supported the U.S. position. However, during September 2005

preparatory meetings, the EU seemingly shifted its support towards an approach which favored an

enhanced international role in governing the Internet. Read more here from FAS.

President Barack Obama’s drive to hand off control of Internet domains to a foreign multi-national operation will give some very unpleasant regimes equal say over the future of online speech and commerce.

Breitbart: In fact, they are likely to have much more influence than America, because they will collectively push hard for a more tightly controlled Internet, and they are known for aggressively using political and economic pressure to get what they want.

Here’s a look at some of the regimes that will begin shaping the future of the Internet in just a few days, if President Obama gets his way.

China

China wrote the book on authoritarian control of online speech. The legendary “Great Firewall of China” prevents citizens of the communist state from accessing global content the Politburo disapproves of. Chinese technology companies are required by law to provide the regime with backdoor access to just about everything.

The Chinese government outright banned online news reporting in July, granting the government even tighter control over the spread of information. Websites are only permitted to post news from official government sources. Chinese online news wasn’t exactly a bastion of freedom before that, of course, but at least the government censors had to track down news stories they disliked and demand the site administrators take them down.

Related reading: Dangerous Transfer: The President’s ICANN Internet Problem

Unsurprisingly, the Chinese Communists aren’t big fans of independent news analysis or blogging, either. Bloggers who criticize the government are liable to be charged with “inciting subversion,”even when the writer in question is a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Chinese citizens know better than to get cheeky on social media accounts, as well. Before online news websites were totally banned, they were forbidden from reporting news gathered from social media, without government approval. Spreading anything the government decides is “fake news” is a crime.

In a report labeling China one of the worst countries for Internet freedom in the world, Freedom House noted they’ve already been playing games with Internet registration and security verification:

The China Internet Network Information Center was found to be issuing false digital security certificates for a number of websites, including Google, exposing the sites’ users to “man in the middle” attacks.

The government strengthened its real-name registration laws for blogs, instant-messaging services, discussion forums, and comment sections of websites.

A key feature of China’s online censorship is that frightened citizens are not entirely certain what the rules are. Huge ministries work tirelessly to pump out content regulations and punish infractions. Not all of the rules are actually written down. As Foreign Policy explained:

Before posting, a Chinese web user is likely to consider basic questions about how likely a post is to travel, whether it runs counter to government priorities, and whether it calls for action or is likely to engender it. Those answers help determine whether a post can be published without incident — as it is somewhere around 84 percent or 87 percent of the time — or is instead likely to lead to a spectrum of negative consequences varying from censorship, to the deletion of a user’s account, to his or her detention, even arrest and conviction.

This was accompanied by a flowchart demonstrating “what gets you censored on the Chinese Internet.” It is not a simple flowchart.

Beijing is not even slightly self-conscious about its authoritarian control of the Internet. On the contrary, their censorship policies are trumpeted as “Internet sovereignty,” and they aggressively believe the entire world should follow their model, as the Washington Post reported in a May 2016 article entitled “China’s Scary Lesson to the World: Censoring the Internet Works.”

China already has a quarter of the planet’s Internet users locked up behind the Great Firewall. How can anyone doubt they won’t use the opportunity Obama is giving them, to pursue their openly stated desire to lock down the rest of the world?

Russia

Russia and China are already working together for a more heavily-censored Internet. Foreign Policy reported one of Russia’s main goals at an April forum was to “harness Chinese expertise in Internet management to gain further control over Russia’s internet, including foreign sites accessible there.”

Russia’s “top cop,” Alexander Bastrykin, explicitly stated Russia needs to stop “playing false democracy” and abandon “pseudo-liberal values” by following China’s lead on Internet censorship, instead of emulating the U.S. example. Like China’s censors, Russian authoritarians think “Internet freedom” is just coded language for the West imposing “cultural hegemony” on the rest of the world.

Just think what Russia and China will be able to do about troublesome foreign websites, once Obama surrenders American control of Internet domains!

Russian President Vladimir Putin has “chipped away at Internet freedom in Russia since he returned to the Kremlin in 2012,” as International Business Times put it in a 2014 article.

One of Putin’s new laws requires bloggers with over 3,000 readers to register with the government, providing their names and home addresses. As with China, Russia punishes online writers for “spreading false information,” and once the charge is leveled, it’s basically guilty-until-proven-innocent. For example, one of the “crimes” that can get a blogger prosecuted in Russia is alleging the corruption of a public official, without ironclad proof.

Human-rights group Agora estimates that Russian Internet censorship grew by 900% in 2015 alone, including both court orders and edicts from government agencies that don’t require court approval. Censorship was expected to intensify even further throughout 2016. Penalties include prison time, even for the crime of liking or sharing banned content on social media.

Putin, incidentally, has described the entire Internet as a CIA plot designed to subvert regimes like his. There will be quite a few people involved in the new multi-national Internet control agency who think purging the Web of American influence is a top priority.

The Russian government has prevailed upon Internet Service Providers to block opposition websites during times of political unrest, in addition to thousands of bans ostensibly issued for security, crime-fighting, and anti-pornography purposes.

Many governments follow the lead of Russia and China in asserting the right to shut down “extremist” or “subversive” websites. In the United States, we worry about law enforcement abusing its authority while battling outright terrorism online, arguing that privacy and freedom of speech must always be measured against security, no matter how dire the threat. In Russia, a rough majority of the population has no problem with the notion of censoring the Internet in the name of political stability, and will countenance absolutely draconian controls against perceived national security threats. This is a distressingly common view in other nations as well: stability justifies censorship and monitoring, not just physical security.

Turkey

Turkey’s crackdown on the Internet was alarming even before the aborted July coup attempt against authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Turkey has banned social media sites, including temporary bans against even giants like Facebook and YouTube, for political reasons. Turkish dissidents are accustomed to such bans coming down on the eve of elections. The Turkish telecom authority can impose such bans without a court order, or a warning to offending websites.

Turkey is often seen as the world leader in blocking Twitter accounts, in addition to occasionally shutting the social media service down completely, and has over a 100,000 websites blacklisted. Criticizing the government online can result in anything from lost employment to criminal charges. And if you think social-media harassment from loyal supporters of the government in power can get pretty bad in the U.S., Turks sometimes discover that hassles from pro-regime trolls online are followed by visits from the police.

Turkish law infamously makes it a crime to insult the president, a law Erdogan has already attempted to impose beyond Turkey’s borders. One offender found himself hauled into court for creating a viral meme – the sort of thing manufactured by the thousands every hour in America – that noted Erdogan bore a certain resemblance to Gollum from Lord of the Rings. The judge in his case ordered expert testimony on whether Gollum was evil to conclusively determine whether the meme was an illegal insult to the president.

The Turkish example introduces another idea common to far too many of the countries Obama wants to give equal say over the future of the Internet: intimidation is a valid purpose for law enforcement. Many of Turkey’s censorship laws are understood to be mechanisms for intimidating dissidents, raising the cost of free speech enough to make people watch their words very carefully. “Think twice before you Tweet” might be good advice for some users, but regimes like Erdogan’s seek to impose that philosophy on everyone. This runs strongly contrary to the American understanding of the Internet as a powerful instrument that lowers the cost of speech to near-zero, the biggest quantum leap for free expression in human history. Zero-cost speech is seen as a big problem by many of the governments that will now place strong hands upon the global Internet rudder.

Turkey is very worried about “back doors” that allow citizens to circumvent official censorship, a concern they will likely bring to Internet control, along with like-minded authoritarian regimes. These governments will make the case that a free and open Internet is a direct threat to their “sovereign right” to control what their citizens read. As long as any part of the Internet remains completely free, no sector can be completely controlled.

Saudi Arabia

The Saudis aren’t too far behind China in the Internet rankings by Freedom House. Dissident online activity can bring jail sentences, plus the occasional public flogging.

This is particularly lamentable because Saudi Arabia is keenly interested in modernization, and sees the Internet as a valuable economic resource, along with a thriving social media presence. Freedom House notes the Internet “remains the least repressive space for expression in the country,” but “it is by no means free.”

“While the state focuses on combatting violent extremism and disrupting terrorist networks, it has clamped down on nonviolent liberal activists and human rights defenders with the same zeal, branding them a threat to the national order and prosecuting them in special terrorism tribunals,” Freedom House notes.

USA Today noted that as of 2014, Saudi Arabia had about 400,000 websites blocked, “including any that discuss political, social or religious topics incompatible with the Islamic beliefs of the monarchy.”

At one point the blacklist included the Huffington Post, which was banned for having the temerity to run an article suggesting the Saudi system might “implode” because of oil dependency and political repression. The best response to criticism that your government is too repressive is a blacklist!

The Saudis have a penchant for blocking messaging apps and voice-over-IP services, like Skype and Facetime. App blocking got so bad that Saudi users have been known to ask, “What’s the point of having the Internet?”

While some Saudis grumble about censorship, many others are active, enthusiastic participants in enforcement, filing hundreds of requests each day to have websites blocked. Religious figures supply many of these requests, and the government defends much of its censorship as the defense of Islamic values.

As with other censorious regimes, the Saudi monarchy worries about citizens using web services beyond its control to evade censorship, a concern that will surely be expressed loudly once America surrenders its command of Internet domains.

For the record, the Saudis’ rivals in Iran are heavy Internet censors too, with Stratfor listing them as one of the countries seeking Chinese assistance for “solutions on how best to monitor the Iranian population.”

North Korea

You can’t make a list of authoritarian nightmares without including the psychotic regime in Pyongyang, the most secretive government in the world.

North Korea is so repressive the BBC justly puts the word “Internet” in scare quotes, to describe the online environment. It doesn’t really interconnect with anything, except government propaganda and surveillance. Computers in the lone Internet cafe in Pyongyang actually boot up to a customized Linux operating system called “Red Star,” instead of Windows or Mac OS. The calendar software in Red Star measures the date from the birth of Communist founder Kim Il-sung, rather than the birth of Christ.

The “Internet” itself is a closed system called Kwangmyong, and citizens can only access it through a single state-run provider, with the exception of a few dozen privileged families that can punch into the real Internet.

Kwangmyong is often compared to the closed “intranet” system in a corporate office, with perhaps 5,000 websites available at most. Unsurprisingly, the content is mostly State-monitored messaging and State-supplied media. Contributors to these online services have reportedly been sent to re-education camps for typos. The North Koreans are so worried about outside contamination of their closed network that they banned wi-fi hotspots at foreign embassies, having noticed information-starved North Korean citizens clustering within range of those beautiful, uncensored wireless networks.

This doesn’t stop South Koreans from attempting cultural penetration of their squalid neighbor’s dismal little online network. Lately they’ve been doing it by loading banned information onto cheap memory sticks, tying them to balloons, and floating them across the border.

Sure, North Korea is the ultimate totalitarian nightmare, and since they have less than two thousand IP addresses registered in the entire country, the outlaw regime won’t be a big influence on Obama’s multi-national Internet authority, right?

Not so fast. As North Korea expert Scott Thomas Bruce told the BBC, authoritarian governments who are “looking at what is happening in the Middle East” see North Korea as a model to be emulated.

“They’re saying rather than let in Facebook, and rather than let in Twitter, what if the government created a Facebook that we could monitor and control?” Bruce explained.

Also, North Korea has expressed some interest in using the Internet as a tool for economic development, which means there would be more penetration of the actual global network into their society. They’ll be very interested in censoring and controlling that access, and they’ll need a lot more registered domains and IP addresses… the very resource Obama wants America to surrender control over.

Bottom line: contrary to left-wing cant, there is such a thing as American exceptionalism – areas in which the United States is demonstrably superior to every other nation, a leader to which the entire world should look for examples. Sadly, our society is losing its fervor for free expression, and growing more comfortable with suppressing “unacceptable” speech, but we’re still far better than anyone else in this regard.

The rest of the world, taken in total, is very interested in suppressing various forms of expression, for reasons ranging from security to political stability and religion. Those governments will never be comfortable, so long as parts of the Internet remain outside of their control. They have censorship demands they consider very reasonable, and absolutely vital. The website you are reading right now violates every single one of them, on a regular basis.

There may come a day we can safely remand control of Internet domains to an international body, but that day is most certainly not October 1, 2016.

Interesting Group Behind the Epic Yahoo Hack

Seems Yahoo could by lying about who actually did the hack and this may be due to the merger between Verizon and Yahoo.

 

The Yahoo hackers weren’t state-sponsored, a security firm says

CSO: Common criminals, not state-sponsored hackers, carried out the massive 2014 data breach that exposed information about millions of Yahoo user accounts, a security firm said Wednesday.

Yahoo has blamed state actors for the attack, but it was actually elite hackers-for-hire who did it, according to InfoArmor, which claims to have some of the stolen information.

The independent security firm found the alleged data as part of its investigation into “Group E,” a team of five professional hackers believed to be from Eastern Europe.

InfoArmor’s claims dispute Yahoo’s contention that a “state-sponsored actor” was behind the data breach, in which information from 500 million user accounts was stolen. Some security experts have been skeptical of Yahoo’s claim and wonder why the company isn’t offering more details.

InfoArmor also claimed that Group E was behind high-profile breaches at LinkedIn, Dropbox and Tumblr. To sell that information, the team has used other hackers, such as Tessa88 and peace_of_mind, to offer the stolen goods on the digital black market.

“The group is really unique,” Komarov said. “They’re responsible for the largest hacks in history, in term of users affected.” More details here.

**** Advice****

You don’t care who has looked at your emails? Really? Consider:

Here’s a simple exercise I invite you to do. Open your email and take a look at everything that you keep on it, both sent and received conversations. Scan all of them, every attachment you ever sent or received, every personal and work conversation, every email draft.

The truth is, we aren’t aware that we are living a big part of our lives through our email inbox.

We keep it all there, in only one place: photos, contracts, invoices, tax forms, reset passwords for every other account, sometimes even passwords or credit card PINs.

And our emails are interconnected to all our other digital accounts, from bank accounts to social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc), cloud services (Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox), online shops (Amazon, for, ex, where you most likely saved your credit card details as well) and so on.

By simply breaching the email, a malicious hacker can easily get access to all those. They know how to do that.  Read More here…you REALLY need to.

From Digital Guardian:

Wrapping your head around the idea of a breach that affects half a billion users is a difficult task, and it’s not one that anyone has had to contemplate until now. Yahoo’s data breach is far and away the largest on record in terms of the number of users involved. The economic effect on the company will take years to calculate, and it may never be fully known, as is often the case with these breaches. Though Yahoo, already on the ropes and in the middle of a sale to Verizon, may see some rather unpleasant effects quite soon.

From the user’s perspective, too, the massive amount of data taken in the compromise – including dates of birth, email addresses, physical addresses, and security questions and answers – could have far-reaching effects. The information is an identity thief’s starter kit, even without bank account or payment card data. Yahoo has pointed the finger at a state-sponsored attacker, as is customary in these incidents.

“Based on the ongoing investigation, Yahoo believes that information associated with at least 500 million user accounts was stolen and the investigation has found no evidence that the state-sponsored actor is currently in Yahoo’s network. Yahoo is working closely with law enforcement on this matter,” the company said in a statement on the compromise.

As gory as they are, the public details of the Yahoo compromise aren’t what’s really interesting or important here. The intriguing part in this case is how long it took Yahoo to uncover and disclose the data breach. In its public statements, the company said it discovered the compromise recently, but the data was stolen in 2014. That fact has drawn the attention of Capitol Hill and a group of senators is asking some very uncomfortable questions of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer.

In their letter, Sens. Ed Markey, Patrick Leahy, Elizabeth Warren, Al Franken, Richard Blumenthal and Ron Wyden asked Mayer when and how Yahoo learned of the breach, why the company took so long to uncover it, and whether any government agencies warned Yahoo of an attack by state-sponsored attackers. The lawmakers also said that the data taken from Yahoo could be used easily in other attacks.

“The stolen data included usernames, passwords, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, and security questions and answers,” the senators said. “This is highly sensitive, personal information that hackers can use not only to access Yahoo customer accounts, but also potentially to gain access to any other account or service that users access with similar login or personal information, including bank information and social media profiles.” Complete summary here.

Presidential Determination Signed to Accept 85,000 Refugees

No wonder the FBI is on a hiring blitz to attempt to vet what is told to be highly vetted and scrutinized refugee applicants.

****

The White House
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release

Presidential Determination — Presidential Determination on Refugee Admissions for Fiscal Year 2016

MEMORANDUM FOR THE SECRETARY OF STATE

SUBJECT:      Presidential Determination on Refugee Admissions for Fiscal Year 2016

In accordance with section 207 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (the “Act”) (8 U.S.C. 1157), and after appropriate consultations with the Congress, I hereby make the following determinations and authorize the following actions:

The admission of up to 85,000 refugees to the United States during Fiscal Year (FY) 2016 is justified by humanitarian concerns or is otherwise in the national interest; provided that this number shall be understood as including persons admitted to the United States during FY 2016 with Federal refugee resettlement assistance under the Amerasian immigrant admissions program, as provided below.

The admissions numbers shall be allocated among refugees of special humanitarian concern to the United States in accordance with the following regional allocations; provided that the number of admissions allocated to the East Asia region shall include persons admitted to the United States during FY 2016 with Federal refugee resettlement assistance under section 584 of the Foreign Operations, Export Financing, and Related Programs Appropriations Act of 1988, as contained in section 101(e) of Public Law 100-202 (Amerasian immigrants and their family members):

Africa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25,000

East Asia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13,000

Europe and Central Asia . . . . . . . . . . . 4,000

Latin America/Caribbean. . . . . . . . . . .  3,000

Near East/South Asia. . . . . . . . . . . .  34,000

Unallocated Reserve . . . . . . . . . . . .  6,000

The 6,000 unallocated refugee numbers shall be allocated to regional ceilings, as needed.  Upon providing notification to the Judiciary Committees of the Congress, you are hereby authorized to use unallocated admissions in regions where the need for additional admissions arises.

Additionally, upon notification to the Judiciary Committees of the Congress, you are further authorized to transfer unused admissions allocated to a particular region to one or more other regions, if there is a need for greater admissions for the region or regions to which the admissions are being transferred.

Consistent with section 2(b)(2) of the Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1962, I hereby determine that assistance to or on behalf of persons applying for admission to the United States as part of the overseas refugee admissions program will contribute to the foreign policy interests of the United States and designate such persons for this purpose. Consistent with section 101(a)(42) of the Act (8 U.S.C. 1101 (a)(42)), and after appropriate consultation with the Congress, I also specify that, for FY 2016, the following persons may, if otherwise qualified, be considered refugees for the purpose of admission to the United States within their countries of nationality or habitual residence:

  1. Persons in Cuba
  2. Persons in Eurasia and the Baltics
  3. Persons in Iraq
  4. Persons in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador
  5. In exceptional circumstances, persons identified by a United States Embassy in any location

You are authorized and directed to publish this determination in the Federal Register.

 

BARACK OBAMA

Another $400 Million, Total is now $5.9 Billion to Syrians

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. State Department said on Tuesday it was providing an additional $364 million in humanitarian assistance to help Syrians caught up in the country’s civil war, bringing total U.S. humanitarian spending for Syria to about $5.9 billion.

Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration Anne Richard said the funding would help provide food, shelter, safe drinking water, medical care and other support for millions of Syrian refugees and the communities that host them.

Richard told a State Department briefing about three-quarters of the additional funding would help people still inside Syria and the rest would assist Syrians who have fled the country.

She also said the United States had admitted some 85,000 refugees over the past fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. That figure included about 12,500 Syrian refugees, exceeding the administration’s goal of 10,000, she said.

State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the push for additional humanitarian aid funds came in part because of deteriorating conditions in Aleppo after the collapse of a ceasefire sponsored by the United States and Russia.

The forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have launched a massive push against rebel-held areas of the city, where some 250,000 civilians are believed to be trapped. Intensive bombing has killed hundreds of people, many of whom died in buildings collapsed by bunker-buster bombs.

“Until the past few weeks we felt like we were on a firm path towards a possible diplomatic resolution to this. We still believe that’s possible,” Toner told a briefing.

“That doesn’t mean we’re not mindful … of the tremendous humanitarian suffering that’s going on right now in Aleppo. And that’s why we’re working so hard to ramp up our assistance,” he added.

While saying the United States continued to seek a diplomatic resolution of the problem, he left the door open to other action.

“We’ll continue to weigh all options. Those discussions are ongoing. I don’t want to rule anything out, but right now we’re focused on the diplomatic one,” Toner said.

He noted the United States has warned that failure to achieve a ceasefire could lead to an escalation of the conflict.

“We cannot dictate what other countries … may or may not decide to do in terms of supporting certain groups within Syria,” Toner said. “You may have a further deterioration on either side … and by deterioration I mean more arming and more conflict between them, and intensification of the conflict.”

****

Jeh Johnson said in a Senate hearing that the government focuses on refugees for resettlement that are good for the country. The vetting in comprehensive and some of the standards to be met by applicants are classified. The concentration is on women and children.

From the DHS website:

U.S. Expands Initiatives To Address Central American Migration Challenges

Over the past year, the United States has taken a series of steps to address the ongoing humanitarian challenges in Central America, particularly for the many vulnerable individuals attempting to leave the region and come to the United States, while also promoting safe and orderly migration and border security. As part of this ongoing effort, the United States is announcing the following initiatives to help vulnerable families and individuals from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

World Refugee Day: #RefugeesWelcome

Secretary Johnson smiling at the camera with his arm around 11 year old Turkish refugee JaafarSeveral months ago while I was in Turkey I met a 9-year-old refugee named Jaafar.  I was immediately impressed with this extraordinary little boy who spoke almost perfect English.

Readout of Secretary Johnson’s Trip To Turkey

Secretary Johnson visits a Turkish-government run Syrian refugee camp in Adana, TurkeyToday, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson concluded a three-day trip to Turkey, where he visited a refugee camp, reviewed resettlement processing, spoke to a number of Syrian and Iraqi refugee families, met with government officials in Istanbul and Ankara to discuss a range of homeland security-related issues, and signed two bilateral accords to codify mutual commitment to deepen collaboration.

Readout Of Administration Call With Law Enforcement Officials On Refugee Screening

Senior Administration officials spoke by phone today with state and local law enforcement representatives from across the country to provide information on the U.S.’s stringent refugee admissions policies and security screening measures. Officials on the call included Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas; Department of State Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Simon Henshaw; U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner R. Gil Kerlikowske; and FBI National Security Branch Executive Assistant Director John Giacalone.

Written testimony of USCIS for a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest hearing titled “Oversight of the Administration’s FY 2016 Refugee Resettlement Program: Fiscal and Security Implications”

U.S. Citizenship and Immigrations Services (USCIS) Refugee, Asylum and International Operations Refugee Affairs Division Chief Barbara Strack and USCIS Fraud Detection & National Security Associate Director Matt Emrich address USCIS’s role in refugee resettlement, and the screening measures and safeguards developed by the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.

Hey Comey, Your Friday Night DocDump Proves Intent

One has to wonder if James Comey even read the 302’s he approved for release late Friday. Seems all kinds of people were in fact sounding alarms and telling the truth but the FBI did not see anything related to intent? Wow….Hillary’s own close and long time friend as well as attorney, Cheryl Mills is at the core of this whole matter, but yet we are told by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman, Jason Chaffetz that lil’ old Cheryl was given immunity. Full immunity? Good question, has anyone seen the immunity document granted by the Department of Justice? No…not yet.

 

All of us can officially declare that we have lost any hope for the Department of Justice practicing good law and sadly we can say that the Director of the FBI, James Comey too was part of this collusion. So, sit back and read these items if you can stand it. Fair warning…. this IS INTENT.

We will start with a Reuters piece in part:

A State Department employee, whose name was redacted, told investigators they believed senior department officials interfered with the screening of Clinton’s emails for public release last year in a way that helped Clinton.

The employee, who worked on the screening process, said there was pressure to obscure the fact they were finding classified information in the messages. John Kirby, a State Department spokesman, said in a statement the department “strongly disputes” the claim of interference. Clinton repeatedly said last year she never sent or received classified information, but now says she did not do so knowingly since the release of the FBI findings.

The employee also said the Defense Department told the State Department last year it had found about 1,000 emails between Clinton and David Petraeus in its records from his time as the director of the United States Central Command.

The State Department has said that Clinton did not include any of her emails with Petraeus when her lawyers screened and returned what they said were all her work emails in 2014. A single conversation of about 10 emails later emerged last year after the Defense Department provided it.

Spokesmen for Clinton have declined to discuss the omission, and did not respond to questions about the new interview summaries.

Kirby, the department spokesman, said he could not “speculate” whether the Defense Department had found more than just a single conversation between Clinton and Petraeus. “We can only speak to the records in our possession,” he said. Full article here.

Now for more disgusting details:

27 things we learned from Clinton’s FBI files

According to the witness, State Department officials at one point attempted to classify information in order to have an excuse to redact it even though the agency’s own Office of Legal Counsel thought the email was not worthy of classification.

The witness said he and other career officers, who were typically involved in the FOIA process and in responding to congressional inquiries, were “cut out of the loop” when Clinton’s emails needed processing. Instead, new staffers were “placed” by “top State officials” to take over the job of screening Clinton’s emails; the witness said the officials — whose identities were redacted — had “a very narrow focus on all Clinton-related items and were put in positions that were not advertised.”

FOIA reviews are supposed to be performed by career officials to prevent politics from affecting the government’s response, particularly in a case as politically fraught as the Clinton email situation.

Clinton deleted nearly 1,000 emails with Petraeus

In Aug. 2015, the Pentagon called the State Department and informed an unnamed official there that “CENTCOM records showed approximately 1,000 work-related emails between Clinton’s personal email and General David Petraeus.”

The FBI noted that “[m]ost of those 1,000 emails were not believed to be included in the 30,000 emails” that Clinton turned over to the State Department in Dec. 2014.

Officials felt ‘pressure’ not to classify any Benghazi emails

 

At least one witness told the FBI he felt “pressure” not to upgrade any information in a highly-anticipated batch of 296 emails related to Benghazi.

The witness said Patrick Kennedy, the State Department’s undersecretary for management, went to the FBI and “pointedly asked” the bureau “to change [its] classification determination” for a Benghazi email that had been marked classified.

The Benghazi-related emails were among the first records from Clinton’s private server to be made public.

Kennedy “categorically rejected” the notion that he would obstruct the FOIA process when he sat down with FBI agents in Dec. 2015.

Sidney Blumenthal advised more high-level officials

Clinton has often defended her relationship to longtime confidante Sidney Blumenthal by referring to his detailed missives — some of which are now at least partially classified — as unsolicited memos from an old friend.

But Jake Sullivan, Clinton’s former deputy chief of staff, told the FBI he also spoke directly with Blumenthal during his tenure.

Sullivan said he spoke by phone with Blumenthal and emailed with him occasionally, even acting as a go-between for Blumenthal and Clinton or other high-level officials.

Blumenthal’s controversial style prompted the Obama White House to ban him from working in the administration. However, Clinton’s private emails exposed the informal position he held within Clinton’s State Department.

 

Sullivan described Blumenthal as someone who “likes to help the cause.”

State Department officials definitely knew about the server

Many high-level agency staffers, including Kennedy, have claimed they knew nothing of Clinton’s private email server until they saw stories about it in the news.

A common defense for officials who could be implicated if they admitted prior knowledge of the network has been to acknowledge Clinton’s occasional use of a personal address to send messages but to deny awareness of the hardware that sat in her basement.

One unnamed witness who worked in the State Department’s IT office told the FBI he was aware of the server system since the day Clinton was sworn in.

That was because the witness was forced to work with Bryan Pagliano, the technology specialist who had built the server for Clinton, in order for the server to accommodate Clinton’s government work.

For example, the witness “interacted with [Pagliano] to keep [the server] communicating with State systems” during the “5-6 instances” in which Clinton’s private emails were intercepted by the government’s security systems before they could reach the .gov inboxes of her colleagues.

Although the witness helped Pagliano keep the server running remotely, the individual told the FBI “he did not know how the server was paid for or where it was physically located.”

At least three people had emails on the ‘clintonemail.com’ network

Besides Clinton, the only other individual known to have used an email address on the “clintonemail.com” domain was Huma Abedin, then her deputy chief of staff.

Justin Cooper, a former aide to Clinton’s husband and to the Clinton Foundation, told the FBI that at least one other person used an account on that network “as part of their association or work for Hillary Clinton.”

That person’s name, or multiple other names, were redacted by the FBI. Clinton has sworn under penalty of perjury that Cheryl Mills, her former chief of staff, did not use an account on the server.

Pagliano tried to sound the alarm

In a Dec. 2015 interview with the FBI, Clinton’s former IT aide said he had repeatedly attempted to warn her team about the potential record-keeping implications of her unauthorized network.

Pagliano said he had been called into a high-level State Department official’s office in summer 2009 and asked if he knew about the existence of a “clintonemail.com” domain in use by the former secretary of state.

When Pagliano relayed the incident to individuals whose names were redacted, an unidentified witness had a “visceral” reaction and “didn’t want to know anymore.”

One unidentified witness told Pagliano in 2009 that Clinton’s private email use “may be a federal records retention issue” and stated “that he wanted to convey this to Hillary Clinton’s inner circle, but could not reach them.”

Pagliano said he “then approached Cheryl Mills in her office and relayed [redacted]’s concerns regarding federal records retention and the use of a private email server.”

However, Mills dismissed the concerns by arguing other former secretaries of state had done the same thing — an assertion later proven false.

Witnesses were nervous about talking to the FBI

One former State Department aide told investigators she was worried Clinton would be angry if she learned the unnamed individual had spoken to the FBI.

At the end of her Dec. 2015 interview, the witness told agents “she had not mentioned the interview to Clinton or any of [her] contacts from [State Department].” That witness explained her concerns that Clinton and her staff “could be upset to learn she spoke with the FBI without telling them.”

President Obama used a fake name

During an interview with Abedin, FBI agents presented the longtime Clinton aide with a copy of an email from Obama to Clinton.

The president had used a pseudonym to communicate with Clinton on her private server.

“How is this not classified?” Abedin “exclaimed,” according to the FBI’s summary of its conversation with her.

Abedin explained that Clinton had notified the White House when she changed her primary email address because Obama’s network was set up to block unfamiliar accounts from sending him messages.

The new revelation has raised questions about the president’s claims to have had no knowledge of Clinton’s private email use before March 2014, since her private address had to be added manually to a list of accounts with permission to communicate with his own server.

FBI agents conducted interviews in Denver, San Francisco

FBI agents traveled to Denver in September of last year to question employees of Platte River Networks, the Colorado company Clinton hired in 2013 to manage her email network.

At least one employee of Platte River, Paul Combetta, was granted an immunity agreement in exchange for information.

Combetta was asked to delete emails in defiance of a preservation order for those documents that had been issued by the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

Agents also traveled to San Francisco to question Lewis Lukens, a former State Department official during Clinton’s tenure.

Clinton’s team tried to mop up emails after NYT story

In March 2015, an unspecified individual from Clinton’s staff reached out to Platte River to determine how many emails existed and where those records were stored. The New York Times exposed Clinton’s private email use in a story on March 1 of that year.

Clinton’s team sprang into action in the immediate aftermath of that story, scrambling to account for the location of any email she might have sent during her State Department tenure in the days between the initial Times story and her first public statements on the controversy at a press conference on March 10, 2015.

Another unnamed employee at the firm said he received an email from Clinton’s staff on March 9 of that year but told FBI agents he “did not recall seeing” the preservation order attached to that email by David Kendall, Clinton’s primary attorney.

Yet another unnamed staffer from Platte River told investigators he genuinely believed the archive of Clinton’s emails “should still be on the server in possession of the FBI.”

He said only two people in the world had the authorization to delete an entire mailbox. The names of those two individuals were redacted.

A dated list of files on the server indicated the archive of Clinton’s emails was still on the server by the time the list was generated in Jan. 2015 — a month after the original batch of 30,000 emails was provided to the State Department.

But at some point over the next few months, someone scrubbed the archive from the server.

Staffers shattered discs that stored emails

After Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s former chief of staff, asked a Platte River staffer in July 2014 to hand over all of Clinton’s correspondence with any address that ended in “.gov,” the employee burned the emails onto DVDs and prepared to ship them to Mills.

However, Mills said she didn’t want the discs to be transferred via mail and instead asked the tech specialist to arrange a “secure electronic transfer” of the emails. The Platte River staffer said he “destroyed the DVDs by breaking them in half” once the digital transfer was complete.

The July 2014 request came just two months after the House Select Committee on Benghazi was created

Witnesses pleaded the 5th during FBI interviews

One employee of Platte River was advised by the company’s lawyer to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights and refuse to answer any further questions when FBI investigators started asking about what the technology specialist had discussed with Kendall.

The agents referred to documentation that the employee had spoken to Mills and Kendall on a March 31, 2015 conference call.

That employee used a digital deletion tool called Bleachbit to scrub emails from the server on the very same day.

The State Department timeline doesn’t fit

Multiple witnesses told the FBI that Mills asked them to round up all of Clinton’s work-related emails in July of 2014. The timing of the request described to investigators fits with the progression of the Benghazi committee’s probe.

But the State Department has said it did not ask Clinton for her emails until Oct. 2014, and claims it only did so because officials realized they had no emails from previous secretaries of state.

Clinton has long touted the fact that the State Department sent letters to other secretaries of state requesting copies of personal emails.

The new timeline confirmed by the FBI suggests it took Clinton’s staff five months to prepare her work-related emails for submission to the State Department. The 30,000 emails she ultimately provided were not given to the agency until early Dec. 2014.

Clinton relied on staff outside State

Justin Cooper, an aide to Clinton’s husband and a former Clinton Foundation adviser, supported Clinton’s staff during her time at the State Department.

Monica Hanley, Clinton’s assistant, told the FBI she would contact Cooper each time she needed to synch Clinton’s BlackBerry with the server that was partially under Cooper’s care.

What’s more, Hanley said she would contact Cooper — not anyone at the State Department — “when [she] needed reimbursement for items she purchased for Clinton.”

Like Pagliano, Cooper performed services for Clinton that were related to her State Department work but that were paid for out of the Clinton’s own pocket.

There’s a lost thumb drive with all the emails on it

Hanley was tasked with transferring all of Clinton’s emails onto a laptop Cooper provided from the Clinton Foundation. That laptop eventually got lost in the mail, a detail that was revealed in the 58 pages of notes the FBI released on Sept. 2.

But Hanley also transferred all of Clinton’s emails onto a thumb drive at the same time. She told the FBI she “could not recall what happened to the thumb-drive.”

The transfer came in spring 2013, shortly after longtime Clinton confidante Sidney Blumenthal’s inbox was breached by a Romanian hacker. Platte River advised the former secretary of state to change email addresses, touching off the shuffle of records onto devices that were ultimately lost.

Clinton’s attorney was cleaning up

In addition to the conference call with a Platte River employee that prompted that employee to suddenly invoke his Fifth Amendment rights, Kendall contacted Hanley in “March or April 2015,” shortly after the New York Times story was published.

Hanley did not describe what she and Kendall discussed, but she immediately cleaned out State Department records from her inbox after she spoke with him.

“Following her conversation with Kendall, Hanley searched the Gmail account she used while at [State Department] for any email communications with state.gov accounts and deleted emails associated with state.gov accounts,” the FBI wrote in its report.

An aide left classified documents in a Russian hotel room

Hanley was given “verbal security counseling” after she accidentally left a classified document and a sensitive “briefing book” in a Russian hotel suite she was using with Clinton.

Diplomatic security officers “found a classified document from the briefing book in the suite during a sweep following Clinton and Hanley’s departure” and later told Hanley “the briefing book and the document should never have been in the suite.”

Kennedy may have misled the inspector general

Patrick Kennedy, the undersecretary for management with a history of blocking inspector general probes, assured State Department Inspector General Steve Linick that Clinton had turned over electronic copies of her emails in a July 2015 meeting with the watchdog.

Then, when Linick requested the electronic file for those emails, Kennedy said he only had hard copies.

Linick also referred the FBI to additional witnesses who alleged current employees at the State Department have been “meddling with the FOIA review process.” Other witnesses pointed to Kennedy as a potential interference in the document screening that took place before Benghazi-related records were provided to Congress.

During his internal probe of agency email practices, Linick said Pagliano refused to be interviewed by the inspector general’s team about his involvement with the Clinton network.

Clinton ‘could not use a computer’

Abedin told the FBI Clinton conducted most of her work in person or on paper due to her limitations with technology.

“Abedin explained that Clinton could not use a computer and that she primarily used her iPad or BlackBerry for checking emails,” the FBI wrote of its April interview with Abedin.

Another witness told the FBI Clinton had “little patience” for technology problems.

State officials weren’t buying Clinton’s email excuses

Clinton continues to stress the fact that most of the classified emails found on her server were only retroactively designated as such — that is, they were not classified at the time they were written, but merely upgraded to classified at a later date due to a change in circumstances regarding the information.

An unnamed witness told the FBI he had “heard the argument” but didn’t quite buy it.

“It was very rare for something that was actually unclassified to become classified years after the fact,” the witness told investigators.

Including the retroactively classified documents, there were more than 2,000 classified records on Clinton’s server.

Clinton left the doors of her SCIF open when she wasn’t home

The State Department had installed SCIFs, or areas designed for the secure consumption of classified material, in both her her New York and Washington, D.C. homes.

Clinton did not always keep those areas secure, however. Cooper told the FBI she was careless when it came to keeping the SCIFs locked.

“The SCIF doors at both residences were not always secured, including times when Clinton was not at the residences,” Cooper told the FBI, according to its summary of their second of three interviews with the former Clinton family aide.

State officials worried about Clinton and classified material from the start

Eric Boswell, assistant secretary for diplomatic security for most of Clinton’s tenure, said his team had concerns about how the incoming secretary of state and her staff would treat classified areas from the beginning of their tenures.

Specifically, diplomatic security personnel worried that Clinton and her team would use their BlackBerrys inside the SCIF that encompasses much of the seventh floor at State Department headquarters, an area known as “Mahogany Row.”

Clinton’s staff had asked for a classified-enabled BlackBerry upon joining the agency, but Boswell said no such device exists.

“There was some general concern within [State Department] security personnel that Clinton’s executive staff may try to use their Blackberries [sic] in the SCIF as they were almost all brought on to [State Department] from Clinton’s campaign team, and thus were very accustom to using their Blackberries [sic],” the FBI wrote in a summary of its Feb. 2016 interview with Boswell.

Clinton frequently used a flip phone

Clinton cycled through eight BlackBerry while she was secretary of state for a total of 13 devices throughout the life of her email server, the FBI revealed earlier this month.

But she also used a flip phone to make calls, Cooper said, because she found the device “more comfortable to talk on.”

The flip phone allowed her to check emails on her Blackberry while talking on the phone, Cooper told the FBI. He could not identify what model she used and it is unclear whether the FBI ever recovered any of the flip phones in Clinton’s possession.

Tech aides described ‘Hillary cover-up operation’

Platte River employees sent emails describing the ‘Hilary [sic] coverup [sic] operation’ after Clinton’s staff asked them to begin wiping emails in Dec. 2014.

The unnamed employee who authored the phrase told FBI agents that his reference to the “cover-up” was a joke.

Clinton created second personal account when server crashed

The former secretary of state set up a previously undisclosed email account to communicate when her private server system was down.

Hanley told FBI investigators that Clinton likely created the second private account — a “gmail.com” address — to send messages when her server crashed in 2011 during a trip to Croatia.

Clinton’s top aides were hacked

Stephen Mull, a top record-keeping official at the State Department, told the FBI that “sometime in 2011,” he learned from diplomatic security officers about “concern over the possibility that some personal email accounts of [State Department] employees were hacked.”

Mull said Sullivan, who was one of the aides most frequently in contact with Clinton on her email, was among those hacked in the breaches.